Generally speaking, rating refers to the determination of an amount to be charged for a particular billable event. In prior art billing systems, a rater is typically stopped when any re-rating is required, after which events are re-rated. This makes it impossible to support re-rating in a prepaid environment where there are events to be processed in real-time and the rating cannot necessarily be stopped when re-rating is to be done.
In prior art billing systems, it is also necessary to re-rate events from a beginning of a bill cycle, when any re-rating is required. Such systems thus require re-rating of an increasing number of events as time progresses towards an end of the bill cycle even if the events from an earlier period of the bill cycle do not need any re-rating.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.